User-centred design of flexible hypermedia for a mobile guide: Reflections on the hyperaudio experience

A user-centred design approach involves end-users from the very beginning. Considering users at the early stages compels designers to think in terms of utility and usability and helps develop the system on what is actually needed. This paper discusses the case of HyperAudio, a context-sensitive adaptive and mobile guide to museums developed in the late 90s. User requirements were collected via a survey to understand visitors’ profiles and visit styles in Natural Science museums. The knowledge acquired supported the specification of system requirements, helping defining user model, data structure and adaptive behaviour of the system. User requirements guided the design decisions on what could be implemented by using simple adaptable triggers and what instead needed more sophisticated adaptive techniques, a fundamental choice when all the computation must be done on a PDA. Graphical and interactive environments for developing and testing complex adaptive systems are discussed as a further step towards an iterative design that considers the user interaction a central point. The paper discusses how such an environment allows designers and developers to experiment with different system’s behaviours and to widely test it under realistic conditions by simulation of the actual context evolving over time. The understanding gained in HyperAudio is then considered in the perspective of the developments that followed that first experience: our findings seem still valid despite the passed time

XPL the Extensible Presentation Language

The last decade has witnessed a growing interest in the development of web interfaces enabling both multiple ways to access contents and, at the same time, fruition by multiple modalities of interaction (point-and-click, contents reading, voice commands, gestures, etc.). In this paper we describe a framework aimed at streamlining the design process of multi-channel, multimodal interfaces enabling full reuse of software components. This framework is called the eXtensible Presentation architecture and Language (XPL), a presentation language based on design pattern paradigm that keeps separated the presentation layer from the underlying programming logic. The language supplies a methodology to expedite multimodal interface development and to reduce the effort to implement interfaces for multiple access devices, by means of using the same code. This paper describes a methodology approach based on Visual Design Pattern (ViDP) and Verbal Design Pattern (VeDP), offering examples of multimodal and multichannel interfaces created with the XPL Editor

Proceedings of the 2nd IUI Workshop on Interacting with Smart Objects

These are the Proceedings of the 2nd IUI Workshop on Interacting with Smart Objects. Objects that we use in our everyday life are expanding their restricted interaction capabilities and provide functionalities that go far beyond their original functionality. They feature computing capabilities and are thus able to capture information, process and store it and interact with their environments, turning them into smart objects

Multimodal Shared-Control Interaction for Mobile Robots in AAL Environments

This dissertation investigates the design, development and implementation of cognitively adequate, safe and robust, spatially-related, multimodal interaction between human operators and mobile robots in Ambient Assisted Living environments both from the theoretical and practical perspectives. By focusing on different aspects of the concept Interaction, the essential contribution of this dissertation is divided into three main research packages; namely, Formal Interaction, Spatial Interaction and Multimodal Interaction in AAL. As the principle package, in Formal Interaction, research effort is dedicated to developing a formal language based interaction modelling and management solution process and a unified dialogue modelling approach. This package aims to enable a robust, flexible, and context-sensitive, yet formally controllable and tractable interaction. This type of interaction can be used to support the interaction management of any complex interactive systems, including the ones covered in the other two research packages. In the second research package, Spatial Interaction, a general qualitative spatial knowledge based multi-level conceptual model is developed and proposed. The goal is to support a spatially-related interaction in human-robot collaborative navigation. With a model-based computational framework, the proposed conceptual model has been implemented and integrated into a practical interactive system which has been evaluated by empirical studies. It has been particularly tested with respect to a set of high-level and model-based conceptual strategies for resolving the frequent spatially-related communication problems in human-robot interaction. Last but not least, in Multimodal Interaction in AAL, attention is drawn to design, development and implementation of multimodal interaction for elderly persons. In this elderly-friendly scenario, ageing-related characteristics are carefully considered for an effective and efficient interaction. Moreover, a standard model based empirical framework for evaluating multimodal interaction is provided. This framework was especially applied to evaluate a minutely developed and systematically improved elderly-friendly multimodal interactive system through a series of empirical studies with groups of elderly persons

Exploring the Affective Loop

Research in psychology and neurology shows that both body and mind are involved when experiencing emotions (Damasio 1994, Davidson et al. 2003). People are also very physical when they try to communicate their emotions. Somewhere in between beings consciously and unconsciously aware of it ourselves, we produce both verbal and physical signs to make other people understand how we feel. Simultaneously, this production of signs involves us in a stronger personal experience of the emotions we express. Emotions are also communicated in the digital world, but there is little focus on users' personal as well as physical experience of emotions in the available digital media. In order to explore whether and how we can expand existing media, we have designed, implemented and evaluated /eMoto/, a mobile service for sending affective messages to others. With eMoto, we explicitly aim to address both cognitive and physical experiences of human emotions. Through combining affective gestures for input with affective expressions that make use of colors, shapes and animations for the background of messages, the interaction "pulls" the user into an /affective loop/. In this thesis we define what we mean by affective loop and present a user-centered design approach expressed through four design principles inspired by previous work within Human Computer Interaction (HCI) but adjusted to our purposes; /embodiment/ (Dourish 2001) as a means to address how people communicate emotions in real life, /flow/ (Csikszentmihalyi 1990) to reach a state of involvement that goes further than the current context, /ambiguity/ of the designed expressions (Gaver et al. 2003) to allow for open-ended interpretation by the end-users instead of simplistic, one-emotion one-expression pairs and /natural but designed expressions/ to address people's natural couplings between cognitively and physically experienced emotions. We also present results from an end-user study of eMoto that indicates that subjects got both physically and emotionally involved in the interaction and that the designed "openness" and ambiguity of the expressions, was appreciated and understood by our subjects. Through the user study, we identified four potential design problems that have to be tackled in order to achieve an affective loop effect; the extent to which users' /feel in control/ of the interaction, /harmony and coherence/ between cognitive and physical expressions/,/ /timing/ of expressions and feedback in a communicational setting, and effects of users' /personality/ on their emotional expressions and experiences of the interaction